Acadia, Acadia! ... the Real Story is Fascinating and Full of Surprises‪.‬

WAYNE GRADY is the author of Chasing the Chinook: On the Trail of Canadian Words and Culture, from which this piece is excerpted. The book will be published this fall by Penguin. BUCTOUCHE is a small town at the mouth of the Buctouche River in New Brunswick. It is also the summer home of Antonine Maillet. I had just translated Maillet's short novel Christophe Cartier de la noisette, dit Nounours, and was about to embark on her monumental allegory Le Huitieme jour, and I wanted to get the lay of the Acadian landscape. I had a literary sense of the Buctouche area, but I wanted to see it and hear it for myself. I stopped outside a low brick building, one of those five-and-dime stores that sell cheap clothes and expensive souvenirs, including small Acadian flags - the French tricolore with a yellow Stella maris in one corner. When I went up to the cash, I asked, in my best French, which house belonged to Antonine and received a long, friendly reply. To my complete astonishment I could not understand a word of it. I had entered a private realm, a kind of hidden valley that had its own customs, its own flag, and its own language. Some call this place the Republic of Madawaska, but for more than 350 years it has been known as the land of Acadia.